This was so fiddly to make!! Spaghetti does not submit gracefully to being made into a bridge, anyway here’s pics of the bridge in construction: I’ve worked out that my final bridge was made out of approximately 176 strands of spaghetti, if my bridge is to hold as much as each individual strand can hold it should support […]

If a structure is going to be strong it needs support struts, the square bellow did not take much effort to break: Now if you add an extra strut… …it becomes much stronger, this is called triangulation. The bridge structure I’ve chosen are a selection of methods of using triangulation. Now for the bridge structures, I’m […]

First things first, how much weight can a single strand of spaghetti take? To make sure that all my tests are fair I’ll be adding the weight in small increments and waiting 10 seconds between each to make sure that it is actually taking the weight. I’ll also be performing each test 5 times to […]

As part of my structures investigations I’ve decided to have a go at the spaghetti bridge challenge. Sound odd doesn’t it It involves making a bridge structure out of nothing but spaghetti and hot melt glue following a list of task parameters. The official spaghetti bridge world championships has a very stringent set of rules […]

Right that’s external forces but what about forces acting internally? Take this column for example: What are the forces acting within it to stop it crumbling into a heap, whats keeping it in equilibrium? The column is under compression so it pushes up against the ceiling and down against the floor to balance the forces […]

So I’ve got structures, forces and how forces are applied but what if you have more than one force acting on an object at one time? Dean used a really good visual example: think about a tennis ball floating on a pond, a pump is pushing the water in one direction and a breeze is […]

So now I know the structure and forced involved… what about the application of those forces? Distributed - This is also known as a UDL (universally distributed load), it’s simply a load that it distributed along a surface. Concentrated – A load that is gathered on a point. Static – A load that does not move. […]

Ok, I’ve got the types of structures down but what about the forces that act on them? Compression This action is when a substance is put under force from each end, like standing on a block of foam, it is being compressed between your feet and the floor. If the material subject to compression […]

So, my first foray into the wide world of structures… There’s tone of information so I’m going to detail as much of it as I can here to act as a reference. Structures can be broken down first into two categories: natural and manufactured Natural structures are classified as ‘not being made by people and […]